Mental Health is Health

Throughout my adult life, it is now clear that I suffered from what experts call "chronic ambivalence." I wrestled with decisions well beyond the point of clarity and wound up stuck with harmful consequences. In careers, chronic ambivalence may involve things like wanting desperately to remove ourselves from jobs or occupations that are incompatible with our stress-tolerance; confronting or leaving toxic supervisors, associates, clients, or even organizations; or failing (not for the lack of trying) to achieve healthier lifestyles. We want all these things, but just don't get them done. The longer this goes on, the more difficult it gets, and we wind up blaming ourselves. For years, I "shot arrows" at myself for not taking action and talked myself into believing that the stressors were self-imposed or a result of my inability to navigate the corporate machine -- even as a leader in the machine. Ultimately, I fell into a deep depression and wound up hospitalized....

As a boy growing up in the Christian church, I remember learning and exploring our “lasting” virtues: faith, hope, and love. But I also remember never quite getting my head or my heart around one of the three. I think faith made sense to me just because it was kind of the reason we were there. Love resonated because I could feel it in my family, and I was starting to notice girls in that way.  But hope back then was just a word. I “hoped” for a bike at Christmas, but that was about it.   I was well into adulthood before I began to reckon with what hope really means. It probably began when everyone started speculating that the lack of it caused my big brother to take his own life. And it really kicked in as I started dealing with tough depressive symptoms of my own.   Recently, I found myself frustrated over my inability to help someone close to me recognize the very existence of hope in his ci...